In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.

I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)

In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.

The Post-American World

For Fareed Zakaria, the great story of our times is not the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else - the growth of countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Kenya, and many, many more. This economic growth is generating a new global landscape where power is shifting and wealth and innovation are bubbling up in unexpected places.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh’s army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians.

Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. The topics range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

Fukuyama examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar. Why do we say "I am reading a catalog" instead of "I read a catalog"? Why do we say "do" at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history.

The Johnstown Flood

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.

American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane

In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of 21 days, Chuck had three relationships end, one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

To most of us, learning something 'the hard way' implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head and will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

The Art of Critical Decision Making

Learn to approach the critical decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye with this fascinating 24-lecture series that explores how individuals, groups, and organizations make effective decisions. The heart of this accessible series is a thorough examination of decision making at three key levels. First, you'll look at decisions made at the individual level, where, among the many things you'll learn is that intuition is more than just a gut instinct and, in fact, represents a powerful pattern recognition capability.

The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries

Everything we now know about the universe - from the behavior of quarks to the birth of galaxies - has come from people who've been willing to ponder the unanswerable. And with the advent of modern science, great minds have turned to testing and experimentation rather than mere thought as a way of grappling with some of the universe's most vexing dilemmas. So what is our latest picture of some of the most inexplicable features of the universe? What still remains to be uncovered and explored by today's scientists?

A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

A classic since its original landmark publication in 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the first scholarly work to tell America's story from the bottom up - from the point of view of, and in the words of, America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.

The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.

Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck

A stunning look at World War II from the other side.... From the turret of a German tank, Colonel Hans von Luck commanded Rommel's 7th and then 21st Panzer Division. El Alamein, Kasserine Pass, Poland, Belgium, Normandy on D-Day, the disastrous Russian front - von Luck fought there with some of the best soldiers in the world. German soldiers. Awarded the German Cross in Gold and the Knight's Cross, von Luck writes as an officer and a gentleman.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes: The Heirloom Collection

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are rightly ranked among the seminal works of mystery and detective fiction. Included in this collection are all four full-length Holmes novels and more than forty short masterpieces - from the inaugural adventure A Study in Scarlet to timeless favorites like “The Speckled Band” and more. At the center of each stands the iconic figure of Holmes - brilliant, eccentric, and capable of amazing feats of deductive reasoning.

Publisher's Summary

Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost 15 years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty, and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.

My friends and I listened to this book on the way out to the cabin this year. I can honestly say that Eating The Dinosaur made it the most enjoyable car ride we've ever had.

Klosterman has the gift of being able to put what we are all secretly thinking into words. Usually that talent is reserved for brilliant comedians such as George Carlin or Jerry Seinfeld, but Chuck somehow manages to take it even one step further.

Chuck breaths humanity and wit into his essays. He also cleverly has his interview pieces with the actual interviewees and other clever pieces are performed with actors. Chuck uses pop culture to delve deep into the human psyche, finding existential truth in the oddest of places. This book made my two hour commute seemingly fly by in minutes.

This collection of essays is a bit of a hodgepodge of narratives on pop culture, technology, and Chuck's innate observations on everyday life. There isn't a clear flow to the stories, which is annoying but somewhat intriguing all at the same time. He discusses topics ranging from the Unabomber to football, ABBA to time travel, all the while adding his unique flair of witty hipster-nerd humor. It had me laughing out loud during some parts and zoning off uninterested during others. If nothing less, this book will get your thoughts going.

Humorous and philosophical essays in Klosterman's own pop-culture-writ-large idiom. Read by the author himself, and in some cases by his interview subjects (Ira Glass, Errol Morris). It's strange and interesting to hear someone reading their own remarks after the fact. Overall enjoyable, and if you've liked Klosterman's previous works you won't be disappointed. Lost 1 star just for being regrettably short, and in need of some kind of cohesive narrative (although this might apply to all his essay collections).

Chuck Klosterman is the type of person you want to have at a bar table with you. His massive brain has dissected everything ten ways to sunday; from ramifications of time travel to cultural implications of nipple slips. His essays are fascinating, his delivery is uniquely him. Inside all of us is a hidden nerd waiting for something to obsess over, Klosterman not only accepts that nerd, he indulges it.

Even though I enjoyed IV and generally any insightful discussion of pop-culture, I was reluctantly to buy this audiobook because of the few and generally negative user reviews. "Self-absorbed Twaddle" , "Couldn't get into it" and "Ho Hum" they said--what the f*ck, other reviewers! Clearly if you are not interested in dissecting the minutia of pop culture you have come to the wrong place--but as this sort of this goes Eating the Dinosaur is as good as anything out there excepting maybe Malcolm Gladwell at his best or the better "This American Life" episodes, but both of those are more general interest and less pop/rock obsessed, so the comparison is not entirely level. Also, there is a great interview about interviews with Ira Glass, who makes an appearance on the audio book. Don't pay attention to the negative user reviews. If you like Klosterman's other books or if you like Rob Sheffield or you just like music and pop-culture in general, you will like this book.

Chuck Klosterman is one of my favorite authors. I personally like anything he releases. I know this makes me biased. So, take this rating for what it is worth. I think this is a great listen. I hope you give it a chance.

I bought the book being relatively unfamiliar with the author and was pleasantly surprised. Hidden among the "hip" and "glib", there are some pretty good observations and life lessons. I must recommend it...even though I didn't think I would! Entertaining read...

Wasn't familiar with his work, so for a first listen it was good enough to consider another one of his books. While he's not a professional reader, it was his work, so the passion makes up for the polish.

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